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A papermaker in Massachusetts named Zenas Marshall Crane is traditionally credited with being the first to incorporate tiny fibers into the paper pulp used to print money in 1844. But scientists at the University of Notre Dame have found evidence that Benjamin Franklin used colored fibers in processed his paper. home printed currency much earlier, among other findings, according to a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
We first reported on Franklin’s ingenious currency innovations — most likely designed to thwart counterfeiters (although this is disputed by at least one economist) — in 2021, when Notre Dame nuclear physicist Michael Wiescher gave a talk detailing his early findings. group summarized. The new paper, co-authored by Weischer, addresses those earlier results along with the stained fiber evidence. As previously reported, the American colonies initially adopted the barter system of the Native Americans, trading furs and cords of decorative shells known as wampum, as well as crops and imported manufactured items such as nails. But the Boston Mint used Spanish silver for minting coins between 1653 and 1686 and added a little copper or iron to increase their profit (a common practice).
The first paper money appeared in 1690 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony printed paper money to pay soldiers to go on campaigns against the French in Canada. The other colonies soon followed suit, although there was no unified value system for any of the currencies. To combat the inevitable counterfeiters, government printers would sometimes make nicks in the cut of the note, which would be checked against government records to exchange the notes for coins. But this method was not ideal, as paper money was prone to damage.
By the time he was 23, Franklin was a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette and eventually becoming wealthy as the pseudonymous author of Poor Richard’s Almanack. Franklin was a strong supporter of paper money from the start. For example, in 1736 he printed a new currency for New Jersey, a service he also rendered to Pennsylvania and Delaware. And he designed the first currency of the Continental Congress in 1775, depicting 13 colonies as connected rings forming a circle, inscribed “We are one.” (The reverse inscription read, “Mind your business,” because Franklin was a little cheeky.)
University of Notre Dame
“Benjamin Franklin saw that the financial independence of the colonies was necessary for their political independence,” said co-author Khachatur Manukyan. abroad, leaving the colonies with insufficient financial resources to expand their economies.”
Of course, it wasn’t long before counterfeiters introduced counterfeit currency, and Franklin and his network were constantly developing new ways to distinguish counterfeit bills. Some forms of those techniques are still used to detect counterfeits. For example, in 1739, Franklin’s printed currency for Pennsylvania intentionally misspelled the name of the state. The intent was to set a trap for counterfeiters, who would presumably correct the spelling errors in their counterfeits.
Franklin kept a separate ledger, in addition to his main ledger, recording his dealings with a papermaker named Anthony Newhouse. Franklin purchased “money paper” from Newhouse sometime in the mid-1740s and likely kept those transactions separate to keep his work on security features confidential, according to the authors. “To maintain the reliability of the banknotes, Franklin had to stay one step ahead of counterfeiters,” said Manukyan. “But the ledger that we know recorded these printing decisions and methods has been lost to history. Using the techniques of physics, we were able to partially recover what that record would have shown.
